Shakespeare given international twist at upcoming Globe To Globe festival

 Shakespeare given international twist at upcoming Globe To Globe festival 

Globe To Globe: An innovative new festival will see 37 of Shakespeare’s plays performed in 37 different languages.

In a rehearsal room at the Marjanishvili, a beautifully preserved art deco theatre in Tbilisi, Touchstone is throwing Orlando to the ground. Audrey is sucking on a bottle of vodka and Rosalind and Celia are hanging out in wardrobes by the stage. A plume of smoke rises above the director, Levan Tsuladze, mingling with smoke from everyone else – there are so many cigarettes, the room is turning blue. Tsuladze barks out an instruction. Audrey takes another swig. Orlando gets up grinning.
This is Shakespeare, Georgian style, and it’s coming to Shakespeare’s Globe. Over the next two months, audiences can hear Shakespeare in Georgian and Armenian, and 35 other languages (including sign) as part of Globe To Globe, a groundbreaking theatrical incarnation of Babel. Nationalities in dispute will perform Shakespeare cheek by jowl – Israel’s Habima National Theatre is performing The Merchant Of Venice; the Palestinian Ashtar Theatre, Richard II – and countries as old as China will be joined by those as young as, excitingly, South Sudan.
Shakespeare will be presented as a truly international poet, although back in Georgia, Tsuladze is making claim to Shakespeare as essentially Georgian. ‘While in Turgenev people are still drinking tea, four people have died in Shakespeare,’ says Tsuladze. ‘That’s much closer to the Georgian spirit.’
You can find parallels for everyone’s story in Shakespeare, and Tsuladze is using As You Like It (May 18 and 19) to tell a very Georgian one. ‘The Forest of Arden is a place of freedom where one feels love, joy, pain, everything,’ he says. ‘And there’s only one other place where you can feel that, which is a theatre. Especially a small theatre living in hardship.’ He’s partly referring to the company he set up, Georgia’s first independent theatre company, The Basement Theatre (in 1997, before he took over at the Marjanishvili), and which staged plays banned during the Soviet occupation.
Tsuladze talks of a time when the KGB would infiltrate performances and Georgian audiences learned to attribute a double meaning to what was spoken on stage. Georgia is now independent but its relationship with Russia remains critical – Russia invaded Tbilisi in 2008 in support of the separatist governments of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. ‘For a while, we were making theatre that would simply help audiences survive,’ he says. ‘The idea of resistance is everywhere in Georgian theatre. Everything they feel in the Forest of Arden, I’ve felt. Arden is a metaphor for theatre itself.’
Farther south, the Gabriel Sundukyan National Academic Theatre of Armenia is in rehearsal for King John (May 16 and 17) in its, equally magnificent, 1920s theatre in Yerevan. This production is looking terrific: Queen Eleanor is sporting nails like twigs; the French and English go to war using suitcases as weapons; the production has the feel of an epic, black absurdist tragedy. ‘People think King John is one of Shakespeare’s weaker plays,’ says Armen Marutyan, who plays the King. ‘But I think you can draw a line between King John, Hamlet and King Lear.’
Director Tigran Gasparyan, who sucks on Marlboros as though they were life-support machines, argues that democracy is key to the play. ‘The main idea is that no king or president should ever take power by force; that way will not end well,’ he says. ‘The people were as important then as they are today.’
Armenia, too, has its own legacy of violent political oppression – this proud, ancient country has endured successive Mongol and Ottoman rule, as well as Soviet. Meanwhile, the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the ongoing struggle to get official recognition for it (including from Britain) remains a weeping sore. ‘There’s no one in Armenia who doesn’t bear the trace of what happened,’ says Gasparyan. ‘But the effect of art and culture on a person is more vivid than a piece of paper.’
‘If theatre can’t relate to the everyday struggle for life and love, what can?’ adds Marutyan. ‘It’s a common language in France, Japan. Our earth is so small, all our problems are the same.’

Lawlessness

Review by Howard Loxton (2011)

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
By Louis de Bernières, adapted by Mike Maran
Mercury Theatre Company and Kote Marjanishvili Theatre, Tbilisi in association with NFA International Arts and Culture
Mercury Theatre, Colchester

Review by Howard Loxton (2011)
This is a remarkable production and remarkably ambitious in that it is a collaboration between two companies, one in eastern England and the other 2,200 miles away in western Asia, that not only uses actors from both but combines live performers with puppets to tell a very private story set against international conflict.
It is based on de Bernières best-selling novel so the plot will probably be widely known to many in its audience. Of course, in a two and a half hour adaptation they will find things missing, but Mike Maran’s adaptation is much more true to the book than the Hollywood movie version.
The main loss is the earlier part of the Captain’s story and the strand of Carlo’s love for him. He is still there as a plot point to save the Corelli’s life but with no live actor to represent him he becomes just one more among Corelli’s company and we have lost one of the most true and touching parts of Bernieres’ writing. The other thing that is missing is Corelli playing the eponymous mandolin. We have the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra playing music specially composed by Vakhtang Kakhidze, plus chunks of Verdi and a quote from a tradition Greek dance but though he carries it Corelli never touches its strings.
Maran opens the story with Dr Iannis at his wife’s grave sharing his news and thoughts with her, especially about their daughter Pelagia who is growing up, falls in love with a local fisherman then, during the occupation by the Italian army, with Corelli. Maran plays the doctor himself with a Scottish accent marking him an incomer, and with the excellent Georgian actress Natalie Kakhidze, (whose slightly accented English sounds almost native) they make a very believable father and daughter. They are paired, as are all the major characters, with equivalent puppet figures and scenes are sometimes played by both their live and their wooden characters at the same time. Once this style has been established it works well, though since the puppets are quite small and their faces difficult to see unless you are very close, attention tends to stay with the actor when they are together.
The relationship between Dr Iannis and the village is well established too, but here he is interacting with the puppets. There are tiny cameos for a patient and his overbearing wife but only the little priest (another incomer with a Scouse accent) takes a real part in the story. The other puppets are more effective en masse as the grouped villages always keen to know what is going on and as the opera-singing members of the Italian army.
The puppets are used performing on table tops, which sometimes spread right across the stage. Director Levan Tsuladze has devised and choreographed a technique of gliding these tables on and off that becomes part of the performance and greatly adds to the effect, especially when a group of the puppet people are on the move.
There are ten Georgian puppeteers operating more than 30 puppets, for these rod puppets may require three operators each. And they do it very skilfully. Pelagia’s little white goat is clearly an audience favourite; it’s delightful, but their effectiveness is never greater than when the tiniest figure, little Iannis Pelagia’s adopted daughter’s son, appears poking his little head out from behind gravestones scaled ten times bigger than he is. It is a moment that is clearly lit, which not all the puppetry is, and draws total concentration.
The full-sized performers become rather like the puppet characters coming into close up. Tony Casement doesn’t make Corelli the dashing handsome lover, he is just the nicest bloke, takes his responsibilities seriously but a musician who’s not too worldly, which helps to make sense of the final part of the plot. Gus Gallagher plays Mandras, Pelagia’s teenage fisherman fiancée, who returns hurt and brutalized by his wartime experience.
The live contingent is made up by Roger Delves-Broughton doubling Corelli’s Quartermaster and a comic British spy whose contact call is “Roast beef moussaka”. While director Tsuladze has integrated a variety of imaginative theatrical techniques into his production, even this joke of an Englishman, it seems to get out of balance with an anti-communist tirade calling for the British to intervene to save Greece from fascism and communism. Perhaps it is understandable given Georgia’s relationship with both the USSR and modern Russia and the original book does take an anti-communist stance, but this was where the book and even more so the film upset many in Greece.
The book, and certainly this adaptation, doesn’t attempt any background to the role of the andartes and the tragedies of the Greek Civil War, when there are plenty of things that Britain can be ashamed of concerning the way we intervened. In the context it was not necessary, the earlier background of the Greek situation before and during the war was not explained either, but this burst of histrionics, however heartfelt the actor made it, stuck out like a sore thumb.

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin runs at the Mercury Theatre until 12th November 2011
 

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Mercury Theatre, Colchester, review By Dominic Cavendish

 This puppet show from Kote Marjanishvili Theatre, Tbilisi, at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester, moves you to tears at its sweeping sense of scarring human experience.

Louis de Bernieres said of his 1994 international bestseller Captain Corelli’s Mandolin that it’s “about what happens to the little people when megalomaniacs get busy”. Well, here’s a delightful adaptation which makes the phrase “little people” theatrically tangible in an eye-opening way.
The Kote Marjanishvili Theatre, Tbilisi has joined forces with the Mercury, Colchester, to create a puppet-based version of the novel that renders the vulnerability of those humble denizens of the Greek island of Cephallonia during the Second World War manifest in dinky miniature.
It’s true that even with a sizeable band of 10 Georgian puppeteers on the go, a major auditorium isn’t exactly the best place to showcase the work’s “poor-theatre” charms, and those seated further back may wish they’d brought binoculars. Yet what’s often astonishing about puppetry is how the slightest inclination of a head or barely perceptible bodily twist becomes part of a language the audience speedily learns, so that a magical process of magnification occurs.
An added ingenuity of Levan Tsuladze’s production is that it sports a handful of actors, drawn from both countries, in the main roles, often appearing alongside their Tom Thumb-sized doppelgangers.
This caters well for the shifts in the novel’s register, from quirky humour to full-throated passion, from epic scale to close-up action (which the 2001 film version should have handled magnificently, but botched). Where a conventional staging would flounder in having to furnish hordes of villagers or occupying armies of Italians and Germans, here a bunch of figurines on a table top does the trick, and can provide a suggestive, non-literal shorthand for the wartime atrocities, too.
Equally, when the emotional drama is at its most intense, we’re offered a decent dose of verisimilitude – with Mike Maran’s Dr Iannis keeping a wise old eye over the misadventures of his beautiful daughter Pelagia (Natalie Kakhidze), whose love for the fisherman Mandras (Gus Gallagher) is eroded by all that combat does to him as well as by the beguiling, buffoonish presence of Tony Casement’s courteous Captain Corelli.
If I have a minor quibble it’s that the famous mandolin of this handsome interloper doesn’t get nearly enough prominence – notwithstanding the stirring and various score recorded by the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra. But a puppet show that can make you coo over a goat barely bigger than a grasshopper and move you to tears at its sweeping sense of scarring human experience? That’s got to be worth a look, hasn’t it?

THEATRE: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin at Mercury Theatre

 On All Hallows Eve, Erin Summers Norman attended Mercury Theatre’s outstanding production, Capain Corelli’s Mandolin, to report back to readers of The Colchester Circle.

Natalie Kakhidze as Pelagia with the puppet Pelagia
It was the perfect night to be in the audience of such a haunting and atmospheric play. Written by Louis de Bernieres and adapted for the stage by Mike Maran, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin sets out to achieve what initially sounds to be a big ask of the audience. Namely, to produce a serious, humorous, and moving play using only six actors, and a whole lot of puppet mastery.
The thirty or so puppets used in the play were designed and made by the very talented Nino Namitcheishvili, and operated by a team of cooperative cast members dressed in unobtrusive black. Throughout, they managed to create a surprisingly mobile and expressive set of bonus actors. Each puppet requires three people to operate, so as you may imagine there was (at times) quite a crowd bustling about on the stage; the puppets dancing on long tables and actors playing around them. The immediate but only hurdle in this play is getting beyond a point where you obsessively study the operators and into the more emotional aspect of the story. However, once you’ve crossed that barrier you find yourself surprisingly glad that the puppets are playing their parts. There is no great difficulty in relating them to the characters they are meant to represent. In fact, one of the stars of the show was undoubtedly the scene stealing puppet goat called Bastardo.

Tony Casement as Captain Corelli and Natalie Kakhidze as Pelagia
Taking place primarily during the Italian occupation of Greece during World War II, the minimal props, brilliant audio contributions, musical score and impressive special effects give a great sense of time and place. The story is one of love triumphing over hate and building bridges in place of waging war. Captain Corelli, playing his mandolin, arrives with his Italian regiment to occupy a hostile Greek village. Taking his housing in the home of Dr. Iannis, he quickly falls in love with the doctors daughter, Pelagia. However she is betrothed to Mandras, a fisherman gone off to fight for the Greeks. He returns, terribly wounded and half insane with hatred towards all, especially Pelagia and the enemy living within her house. Pelagia ends her betrothal to Mandras and quite reluctantly falls for the charms of the rather sweet Captain Corelli, despite the mutual animosity between the Greeks and the Italians.
After Greece is taken by the Allies, fate tears the lovers apart when the Germans order the entire Italian regiment to be killed by firing squad. This scene was particularly harrowing; in the dark theatre the sounds of dozens of gun shots resonated as puppet after puppet staggered and fell. Suddenly it occurs to you how perfect the medium of puppetry is to tell the story of mass slaughter against people being crushed by the demands of their oppressors.

Mike Maran as Dr Iannis with puppet villagers
Dr. Iannis, who opened the play by reading aloud news of the war to the tombstone of his wife, says throughout “God knows we are all in need of miracles.” And that is exactly what they get, though not perhaps as they would have precisely wished. For Captain Corelli manages to survive, and with the help of the Dr. Iannis, Pelagia and the mandolin, they are left to continue their quest for freedom and unity in love against the odds.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin was an inspiring production; thought provoking, entertaining and challenging. I congratulate the cast and crew for pulling off such an ambitious play and I highly recommend seeing it if you can.

A sharp love story told with humour and puppets

 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres, adapted by Mike Maran, at Colchester Mercury until November 12.
A famous story beautifully told. It unfolds slowly like a flower searching for the sun and eventually finds the warm spot that touches us all. It’s done in the simplest of fashions, with flashes of fire, bits of comedy and some endearing puppets.
It is also blessed with sumptuous music and the sort of smiley-weepy ending that would make a Hollywood director very happy. Mike Maran, who adapted the piece and also plays the central role of Dr Iannis, has concentrated heavily on the love story and he has given it a nice tongue-in-cheek touch.
It’s a tale about the Greek island of Cephalonia in 1941 where Pelagia, the doctor’s daughter falls for the mischievous, playful Captain Corelli, leader of the Italian army group that has invaded them. When the Italy later surrenders to the Allies, the Nazis move in and murder all the Italians. But one escapes – just.
Full of delightful satire, the war is always there, bursting literally into occasional beastliness and that’s where the puppets come in. When it comes to mowing down a whole army with a machine gun, they do it with deadly efficiency.
They are worked with great skill by a team of ten, who are also part of the action, telling sweeps of the story, playing all manner of characters, including those of the leading actors when necessary. It’s a concept that seems a bit cluttered at first but then wins you over with its effect and its charm.
This is a joint production with the Marjanishvili Theatre in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi where the show opened a few weeks ago. That’s where the puppeteers come from, as does Natalie Kakhidze, the fiery actress playing Pelagia with dramatic flair and excellent English.
She has a shining partner in Tony Casement who plays Corelli with teasing enjoyment and a great Italian accent and Mike Maran finds keen edges of humour for his Doctor Iannis. Gus Gallagher is a good Mandras, the boy who loses Pelagia to Corelli and Roger Delves-Broughton has a lot of fun as the British spy bumbling about in the mountains.
The music is one of the stars of the show. Composed by Vakhtang Kakhidze, father of actress Natalie, and recorded by the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra, it adds a soaring score that reflects all the moods of the play brilliantly, not least its final moments.

David Henshall

Newspaper 24 Hours

Decameron in Georgian style. Philosophy instead of sex

 Georgia hosts the premiere staging of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron - a set of erotic short stories yet untackled by Georgian directors. Levan Tsuladze has given it a try, and the "human comedy" by the Italian writer of the Renaissance appears absolutely new in his interpretation. As the author says, this is a story about ways "the world goes mad".

The Decameron premiere in Kote Mardzhanishvili State Drama Theater aroused unheard-of interest of the public. Yesterday was the first night. "There were so many people inside that some had to stand in the aisles", - Lela Ochauri, a theater critic, told in an interview with GeorgiaTimes.

- Coming out after the performance, the foyer was packed and there was no room to walk freely. People's expectations were great. Mardzhanishvili Theater is always packed, particularly when Levan Tsuladze presents his works.

There was another reason for the full house - Decameron has never been staged in Georgia because of too immodest episodes. Some lucky men could see Tsuladze's production in autumn 2010 at a press show as part of Tbilisi International Theater Festival. The director's decision to postpone the official premiere of his interpretation is not incidental. The staging has undergone considerable changes over the past nine months.

- As far as I know, Tsuladze, has considered the staging thoroughly, - Ochauri underlines. - Basically, it is not typical of him. He is a kind of director that can produce an accomplished work in a couple of weeks or months. But this story is complicated. He had to write a play on the basis of it on his own. He had to arrange the performance dramatically, move the action onto the scene and bring it to life with the help of art plastique and visual art. I know it took him several weeks of solitary work to define each mise-en-scene. Certainly we hoped to see the result as soon as possible but he knew it would wrong to be in a hurry. This staging is much deeper than the level of emotions and first impressions. That was the reason of delay, I guess.

The result met all expectations. The exalted audience was applauding for a long time.

Boccaccio's short stories recently staged in Russia looked frivolous, joking and light. Georgian Decameron is entirely different from the original against this background, as well as Pier Paolo Pasolini's movie marked "under 16 not allowed". Italian stories interpreted by Tsuladze look quite chaste. Actors are decently clad, and their characters are not absorbed in love problems.

- There is nothing prohibited in the story. A common opinion is that Decameron is an erotic work that deals with young people telling about sexual adventures of others. Yet, the director focuses on relations between a personality and society, society and state, or personality and state. A society can misunderstand free people that can live the way they want or the way God lets them. But they are free from God. That is the backbone of the director's philosophy that helped him come through unscathed. He shows no openly sexual scenes. On the other hand, he doesn't seem interested in them", - our interlocutor believes.

Tsuladze himself expressed the idea of the performance in a slightly different light: it's about ways "the world goes mad". "I think the contemporary world is also moving to a collapse of insanity", - the director explained. By the way, the performance begins with the declaration of war immediately catching attention of the viewer.

- I was astounded at how he combines the Renaissance layer and an absolutely modern interpretation. But he does deserve praise for the fragments he took out of the original and the way he assembled them into a weird, unconventional sequence", - Lela Ochauri remarks.

In addition to the philosophical opening scene, Decameron in Mardzhanishvili Theater is beautiful from the esthetical point of view. "Levan Tsuladze acts as both an artist and a scene-designer. This synthesis is his achievement as well", - our interlocutor adds. Though it would be unfair not to mention other people that contributed to this staging: Giya Margania, the choreographer, Shota Skhirtladze, the stunt director, Vakhtang Kakhidze, the composer. The following actors take part in the show: Malhaz Abuladze, Beso Baratashvili, Marlen Egutia, Kakha Abuashvili, Irma Berianidze, David Hurtsilava, Eka Chkheidze, Manana Kazakova, Zurab Berikashvili.

The next two days will be Decameron's premiere nights supposed to be attended by foreign guests invited by the administration. Further reviews will show whether they will also appreciate the show like Georgia's beau monde did.

Svetlana Bolotnikova

Theatre Preparing for the Premiere

Censorship Makes an Artist Grow

Raspberry, adapted and directed by Levan Tsuladze at Marjanishvili Theatre in Tbilisi, Georgia.

The production I am about to review is not played out on stage. Neither is it played out in theatre lobby, nor in the basement or up in the attic.Levan Tsuladze offered his new production Raspberry to his actors on a small stage erected specially for them in the parterre of the theatre. As for the audience, it was offered an amphitheatre of iron construction directly on stage. It would certainly be a lie if I said that I have never watched a production from stage. Georgian and foreign theatre directors use seats-on-stage for interactivity, for engagement of the audience in the story, for the directness of contact between the actors and the audience, and for the creation of an intimate atmosphere.
Levan Tsuladze as an artistic director of Marjanishvili Theatre never had particular problems with establishing a close contact with the audience. There has never been a single production of his, which did not have a broad audience, although I can remember one unpopular production called Snake Eater, staged in Vake Basement Theatre which was quickly removed from the program and equally quickly forgotten by the audience. Still, Snake Eater was a production with a very particular idea to it. It was a production by a deeply intellectual director prone to a philosophical and artistic pattern of thinking.
I was reminded of Snake Eater by a recent production staged at Marjanishvili Theatre called Raspberry. It is based on University of Laughs (2004), a play by a contemporary Japanese dramatist, screen writer and director Mitani Koki. For me Levan Tsuladze has once again distinguished himself as one of the most interesting directors of our time.
Raspberry shows the director’s attitude towards certain issues, it shows his world view, his refined way of narration and first and foremost his great humor. Humor is evenly distributed throughout the production, but not too much for the audience to lose sight of the main line of the production – censorship vs. an artist’s freedom, an issue which is quite interesting and at the same time hot, essential and important, and not only in Georgia.
For the first time in his career Levan Tsuladze reversed the places of spectators and actors. I am not sure about the final outcome of this particular reversal nor would I wish to interpret the director’s idea behind it, but I vividly recall one particular scene, when the stage started to move and the audience became a witness and a participant of quite an odd spectacle. When the stage started to move, actors stepped down and engaged in this movement together with spectators. The lit backstage transformed into a white and green labyrinth with Neo (Nato Murvanidze) and Tsubaki (Nika Kutchava) running through it. I do not think Levan Tsuladze placed an audience on stage specifically for this uniquely staged mise en scene. It was the play which supposedly gave him the hint.

 Lasha Chkhartishvili